A More Ethical Inquiry Approach With New Materialisms Into School Improvement Policy Implementation

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Post-Qualitative Inquiry Practices for Beginners

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Schools designated as low-performing experience higher rates of teacher turnover for a multitude of reasons that have resisted description in current literature. Considering the violent terminal effects of deficit narratives from these studies that continue to reproduce “failing schools”, my question is how can more ethical inquiry approaches be developed to consider the ignored complexity within challenging school sites? This paper will focus on the tension space between traditional approaches for policy implementation research and a project to develop inquiry practices pivoting with new materialisms and post qualitative theories.

Theoretical framework
The new materialisms are varied approaches to to thinking inclusively about interactions among entities without imposing a binary conception of humans apart from nature and objects. New materialisms scholars vary in their emphasis, however, all are concerned with ontological reconfigurations of engaging materiality that do not presume fixed identities and static relations, while providing a working space beyond critique. The theoretical grounding of this paper will begin with a description of Whitehead’s (1929) process ontology, which allows a generative analysis of encounters in immanent relation and then will follow with contemporary new materialisms scholars.

Modes of inquiry
Reading and thinking with new materialisms scholars is a helpful starting point to think about the reconfigurations that are necessary for inquiry into problems that conventional methods have not been successful and why that is so. This engagement with new materialisms works as a shift from thinking about what is “out-there” that can be observed, evaluated, or counted as essential things and toward thinking how a plurality manifests in relation as a multi-scalar approach in analysis. The emphasis will be the development of ethical practices to open problem spaces and align with concepts such as etho-ecology as described by Stengers (2005) and becoming-with as described by Haraway (2016), which insist on participatory engagement and close attention within dynamic situations.

Data Objects
Thinking with new materialisms theory frames the problem space related to how the enactions of policy implementation and educator practice within a complex context might generate sustainable support with a focus on emergence as a phenomenon of interest. Data objects become critical modes of analysis and are not predicted beforehand.

Results and Significance
This project is significant because of the inequity for students in schools designated as failing. If educators are leaving these schools at higher rates than less challenging school contexts, then it is imperative we understand how the policies designed to improve outcomes for students might be creating the difficult contexts in which educators find it unsustainable to work within. Engaging new materialisms within inquiry practice is a starting point toward different possibilities.

Author

• Cheryl Hudson, University of Georgia - Athens